


A Window Opened

by aurilly



Series: Bucky Barnes, Master Sorcerer of Kamar-Taj [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bucky Is a Sorcerer, Gen, Protective Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 19:32:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19069216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: Steve's been getting inexplicable nighttime visits from Bucky, ones that feel more real than anything that happens when he's awake.Meanwhile, Jonathan Pangborn finds a new protector and friend.





	A Window Opened

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Unforgotten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/gifts).



Steve slept with the window open, Tony's security measures be damned. 

Muggy air and intermittent noises bothered him less than the manufactured drafts and humming compressor of an air conditioner. He'd grown up with New York’s hot night air, had looked forward to it all through the long winters. And the snatches of conversation overheard from outside and other apartments had provided him with a significant amount of educational information as a kid. 

However, if he was honest with himself, the real reason he’d slept with the window open ever since Project Insight was because he still held out an impossible hope that Bucky might come through it. 

It was how they’d first met, actually. Steve and the dark-haired boy across the airshaft had eyed one another through the windows of their bedroom for months. They’d admired one another’s toys with affectedly cool nods, and politely looked away when the other was crying. Then, one day, the boy had climbed out onto his fire escape, sized up the leap, taken a deep breath, and jumped, with Steve watching open-mouthed and awestruck. He’d landed a little awkwardly, catching his left leg on one of the steps and going splat on the rusty black grating of Steve’s fire escape, but he’d recovered quickly, and had let himself into Steve’s room.

“Hey.” 

“Hi,” Steve had replied. He’d never had a visitor before, especially not without his mother around, and especially a stranger who hadn’t been invited. But this boy, for all that they’d never spoken, didn’t feel like a stranger. They’d watched each other too long for that.

“Just wanted to tell you that I’m moving out of this room, so I won’t see you through the window any more. My Ma’s gonna have another baby, so I’m getting put in the living room.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” Steve said, because the boy’s mother’s increasingly round belly had been hard to miss.

“Figured, since things are going to change, we might as well meet. I’m Bucky.”

“Steve.”

And that had been it, picking up a relationship they’d silently already been in.

Now, almost a century after that afternoon, Steve lived and hoped for a repeat, for Bucky to show up in his room like it was no big deal, and to pick up where they hadn’t actually left off. The leap would be a lot bigger this time—not just metaphorically, but also literally. But the forces that had ripped them apart had also granted them the ability to make larger leaps.

Steve shifted on his mattress, as though getting comfortable might also get him cool. The faster he fell asleep, the sooner he might have another of those vivid dreams. Dreams in which Bucky came to visit him. Dreams in which Bucky crawled through the window, just like in the old days. Dreams in which they were their old selves, with none of the changes that war and time had wrought on their bodies—no serum, no metal arm. Just Steve and Bucky, like they were back in Brooklyn. Dreams in which they chatted about everything and nothing. 

It never occurred to Steve to ask what Bucky was up to in these dreams; he was too glad to have him back—to have himself back, too—to rock the boat and call out the impossibility of what was happening. Sometimes they stayed in Steve’s room, reminiscing about the old days when they were both innocent. Sometimes they floated around the Avengers headquarters, looking in on the others, or just admiring the moonlit views. 

And one time—the most recent time—Steve had finally found the courage to tell Bucky how he'd always really felt. Something about floating through the air, something about being a scrappy little weakling again and seeing Bucky whole and almost happy, had finally given him the courage to come out with it. Not with words. He could give a rousing, inspirational, pre-battle speech like none other. But speeches like _that_... Well, he'd always choked. He'd choked every other time he'd ever tried, back before Bucky had fallen and it had felt like too late.

In the dream, he hadn't given a speech. He'd gone in for a shadowy kiss. He could feel it, not quite on the lips, but somewhere deeper. He could feel a tingling when Bucky returned the kiss, and held his hand. They'd spent the whole dream like that, before Bucky had whispered that it was time to go.

"Been wanting you to do that for a long, long time," Bucky had said between kisses.

"You could have said something."

"Never felt like it was safe before. It was all too real before, too scary. But like this, when I visit you like this..." Bucky had said, confusingly.

"Isn't this real?" Steve had asked.

"The part that matters is real. The way I feel about you is real. Some of the rest of it, though..." Bucky looked at his shadowy hands, and at Steve's shadowy little body. "I've learned over the past couple of years that 'real' is a complicated concept."

Steve had no idea what that meant, but he didn't care. Real or not, these dreams had been keeping him going, more sustaining than food.

* * *

**Two Years Earlier**

“You got any gloves that work on these phones?” Bucky—the name still didn’t fit quite right, just like the tight-crotched jeans and soft yet sweat-inducing shirt he’d bought the day before—held up the phone he’d swiped after watching some rich suit enter the unlocking code.

“Yeah, but they’re not as warm as what you’ve got on now,” the sales attendant said, eyeing Bucky’s brown leather gloves.

“Don’t care.” The cold wasn’t what he needed them for.

The sales attendant grabbed a pair from a nearby rack. 

“Forty-five dollars?” Bucky said after flipping them over to check out the tag.

It was highway robbery, but Barnes—that felt a little more right, at least for now—was going to pay it. He had plenty of cash, for what he was pretty sure was the first time in his life. As far as he figured, Hydra had never paid him for work they would have paid anyone else a truly hefty sum. So, it was entirely within his rights to take it from their bank accounts. 

The only problem was the Widow’s publicity stunt. On the one hand, she’d rooted out much of Hydra and gotten them captured. On the other hand, her report had revealed the locations of most of the safehouses where cash and weapons were housed, thus limiting the ones he was able to hit before the Feds stormed in.

With his phone-friendly new gloves stretched over his metal and flesh palms, he wandered the streets of Downtown Brooklyn with his head down, his hands in the pocket of his overcoat, and his mind as overwhelmed as the tourists from Dubuque. The place was like something out of a nightmare, as piecemeal as his memory. There… there was a bank he remembered having taken his jar of coins to for transfer into crisp bills. The building was still there, but now a flashy clothing store shone neon lights on it from across the street. The church where he’d had his confirmation sat in the shadow of a glassy tower. 

He kept walking, past the memories that slotted into place alongside the present-day images, past the edges of a life he was beginning to remember, northwards, to streets where the memories didn’t come as quickly or as painfully. They gradually thinned to nothing as he reached what was called the Kosciusko Bridge, and on into Queens. As soon as he got to the other side of the small canal separating the boroughs, he let himself exhale.

It wasn’t just the memories he’d been trying to leave behind in Brooklyn; it was also the possibility of running into Steve, who, if Barnes—fuck it, Bucky—remembered him at all, was probably expecting him to be there, and was walking the old streets in hopes of a sighting.

Queens was good. Queens was new, blank, fresh. He had an underlying and inexplicable sense that Queens was enemy territory (hazy visions of baseball-related arguments), but wasn’t everything enemy territory these days?

With his sweatshirt and jeans and scruff and downturned head, he had managed to make himself so invisible that other pedestrians had stopped noticing him. He had managed to make himself so invisible that the two guys on the other side of the street must have overlooked him in their quick sweep of the block. They had their eyes on a guy in a wheelchair, and were advancing on him from behind in a way that Bucky recognized as a quietly impending attack.

It was none of his business, and he probably couldn’t afford it, but his legs took him across the street anyway, following him into the alley that the assholes had just cornered the poor guy into. By the time he got there, they had already started to heckle him and punch him around the head. 

Bucky pulled his hoodie even lower over his eyes. “Leave him alone.”

The two muggers glanced at each other and shrugged. “Nah.”

Bucky hadn’t expected that. 

He surveyed the assailants with the eye—or, rather, the dangerous glare—of a professional alleyway savior. He lacked a mirror, but he could feel his brow crinkling with the had-it-up-to-here frustration of one whose fists are in constant demand. Except for the fact that he couldn't quite remember having done this enough times to have built up that level of frustration. Nor was this poor wheelchair-bound schmuck in any way deserving of the that level of resigned irritation, as far as Bucky could see. 

Regardless, a primal, tired rescuer's drive welled up in him, and the next thing he knew, he had rounded the corner into the alley and his left fist was halfway to connecting with Assailant 1's ugly schnoz. Almost too late, he remembered that he shouldn’t punch civilians—even asshole civilians—with his metal hand. He underswung, awkwardly, and punched the space between the guy’s ear and shoulder. This delay gave Assailant #2 a moment’s advantage, getting a half-decent punch to Bucky’s groin, but he was swiftly put down by a roundhouse kick. The knife one of them had pulled on the victim was too easily snatched out of the guy’s hand and slid far under an overflowing dumpster. The second guy slipped in an oily patch on the concrete and got up only to run away. His friend, lip bleeding copiously, followed suit.

“I can’t believe you missed that first punch,” the victim said once the guys had gone. “How the hell did you miss from a two-foot distance?”

Bucky rounded on him. “Whatever happened to ‘thank you’?”

“I didn’t need a rescue. I had it under control.”

“Didn’t look like it to me.”

“I’m paralyzed, not helpless.” Catching Bucky’s expression, he spat, “What the hell are you smiling about?”

Bucky smiled because something about the line, about the frustrated defiance of its delivery, tugged at a memory. Different though, from another fight, in another decade, in another ally. Different from another argument that he could almost hear, if not for the deafening nothingness surrounding the memory.

“This is new, isn’t it?” Bucky gestured at the man’s wheelchair. “You didn’t grow up like this.”

“What do you know about it?”

Maybe it was the mild post-fight adrenaline, maybe it was because this was the first thing he could properly remember doing for someone other than himself, or maybe it was because this was the first non-transactional conversation he’d had since getting out, but Bucky felt like sharing. Or at least testing what sharing and conversing might feel like.

“I lost an arm.” He rapped his knuckles on his left bicep. “Prosthetic.”

"What happened to you?"

“I joined the army,” Bucky said, parroting something he couldn’t quite remember. 

“At least you lost it for something good, for a purpose. Not in a stupid accident.”

“Trust me. There was nothing good about this.”

“You got a read on me. Now I’ll get one on you,” the man said, sounding like he was doing it just to be competitive. “You’ve got the look of someone who just got out of somewhere and doesn’t have a place to go. Who’s been locked up. Jail time, am I right?”

"Not the kind you’re thinking of. Prisoner of war." That’s what some of the papers were spinning it as, probably under Steve’s suggestion. But not all of them. Some of them were calling him to justice.

That wiped the defensive assholery off the guy’s face. Just like that, Bucky could see that here was a decent man, going through a rough time. 

“Shit man,” he said, kindly this time. “For how long?”

“Long time.”

“Afghanistan?”

“No.”

“When’d you get out?”

“About a week ago,” Bucky replied, after he’d counted in his head how many days it had been since the hellicarriers.

"You got family you can call?"

"All dead," he said with near certainty.

"Friends?"

 _Your name is James Buchanan Barnes. You're my best friend._ He thought of the man who had named him, both as an individual and as a friend. He thought of the evidence in the museum and the five or so snatched memories he had so far reclaimed of this apparently famous friendship. He thought of how he'd emptied a cartridge in this friend’s gut and smashed his face even worse than he’d almost smashed those of the muggers.

"No one I should call,” he finally replied.

The man spun around in his chair, did a full 360 as he thought. Finally he wheeled closer to Bucky and stuck out a hand. “Instead of a thank you, how about I give you a place to crash. Just until you figure something out.”

“You don’t know me.”

The man shrugged. “I’ve seen enough to know what I need to know. And I can tell that you’re all right.”

“I’m really not.”

“If you weren’t, you wouldn’t say that.” He began to wheel out of the alley. “You coming, or what?”

There wasn’t much to think about. If he got a bad feeling, this man was hardly a threat. Bucky could leave any time he wanted. 

And a place to stay, even for one night, sounded nice. 

“I’m Barnes, by the way.”

“Jonathan. Jonathan Pangborn. Nice to meet you.”

* * *

“What are you watching now?” Bucky asked when he got home a few weeks later.

“Thing about Nepal. I’ve been Googling around this week. Deep in the dark web.”

“Doesn’t exist. And if it did, you wouldn’t know how to get there.” 

“It does and I do. Anyway, turns out there’s this place over in Nepal that might be able to help. Place where miracles happen.”

“Miracles?” Bucky asked, suspicious, even though he’d seen his fair few.

“Look, I think it’s real. I think this’ll give me my legs back. We should go. ”

“With what money?”

“I’ve got my disability settlement. And you’ve got… all that cash that I haven’t been asking about.”

“You can’t keep spending your settlement on these hare-brained ideas,” Bucky argued, but it was as useless as arguing with Steve had ever been. 

Jonathan frowned and turned back to his program. He only looked when he saw Bucky start to finger his pajamas. “You’re not putting those on now are you?” he asked peevishly.

“Why the hell not?” 

“Because you reek. And you’re covered in car grease. You think I’m gonna let you sit on my couch like that?”

“Fine. Fine. I’ll take a bath. A real bath.”

“You and your baths.”

In the past couple of months, Bucky had remembered enough to know that baths were luxuries. Or, had been luxuries, but now he could take them every day. Hell, even working as a mechanic nearby felt like a luxury: a paying job and an honest one. A job he’d done before everything. 

Bucky dropped his dirty clothes on the floor of the bathroom while he ran the water. When it was nice and full and hot, he got in and promptly propped his heels on the lip of the tub, on either side of the faucet, just above the line of bubbles. Nearby, set up on the dining chair he’d dragged into the bathroom, was an iPad playing CNN. He snuggled even further down into the high field of bubbles until the only part of himself he could see were his feet.

His feet were the only part of him that hadn’t changed, that he recognized from before. Even aside from his arm, everything else about him had grown thicker, longer, veinier, scarred, the change often happening between bouts of consciousness. Even his dick was bigger, which, well, wasn’t necessarily a _problem_ , but it was still different. But his feet remained his own. The wide, hairy big toe and stubby supporting four that he’d propped on the lip of the tub before the war were the same ones he looked at now.

In the past few weeks, starting with that initial walk around Brooklyn, many of Bucky’s memories had slid in as super-imposed duplicates, locking onto a fixed visual object or sound or sentence, and then radiating difference. Today it was his foot against the white subway tile of Jonathan’s bathroom. Then, sliding in around it was a green forest backdrop, with Dum Dum sitting on a log to the left assembling his gun, while Bucky checked himself for trenchfoot. Another shimmer, and this time it was his foot at the center of an image of the boardwalk at Coney Island, sand below and Steve’s incongruously big foot brushing against Bucky’s little left toe.

He was still lost in these kinds of restorative memories when he heard a scuffling in the next room.

And then he remembered that Jonathan wasn’t in much of a state to scuffle. He hopped out of the bathroom, grabbed the gun he’d hidden behind the sink, and creaked the door open just enough to see what was going on. 

Two men stood in the room, looming over Jonathan, who’d been shoved out of his wheelchair and onto the carpet.

Not this shit again. Bucky even recognized these assholes. Blinkhoff and Lannison. Hydra’s golden agents.

"No, we keep him alive for now,” Lannison said. “We can use him to see how well it worked. See if the asset'll turn on his boyfriend."

“Where even is he?” 

“Hiding in the bathroom, stupid.”

In a terrible Russian accent, Lannison began to recite, “Longing. Rusted…”

Bucky reeled backwards, his head starting to pound, and his heart clenching (which was purely human, not part of the intended transformation).

Jon kept struggling, grabbing the asshole’s ankles in an attempt to trip him. Bucky tried to move to him, to help, but the first two words of the sequence had already left him with a nigh-paralyzing headache. 

Next, Blinkhoff said "seventeen" and Bucky's vision went white. He heard a voice in his head screaming at him to fight it. It took him a few seconds to realize it was his own voice, pushed out of him somehow, a piece of himself trying to escape, actually wriggling free while the rest of him succumbed. 

He was shouting pretty loudly—even louder than Jonathan—but gunshots had always been the loudest things around.

The words stopped after the bang, and were replaced by screams that joined Bucky's. He flung his head up to see Baker and Blinkhoff on the ground, curled into quivering insect shapes, and bleeding all over Jonathan's ugly green IKEA rug. Jonathan still lay where he had fallen, but brandished a just-spent hand gun.

And just like that, it was over. Bucky recovered himself and then picked Jonathan up.

“I keep telling you,” Jonathan said, once he was safely on the couch. “I’ve got it. I can take care of myself. And you, too, it turns out.”

“Thanks.”

“What the fuck was that? Coming in _my_ house, talking bullshit.”

“Hydra,” Bucky said, more dispassionately than he had in any of the nightmares he’d had about a moment like this, nightmares in which Jonathan found out, turned him out, nightmares in which this nice little respite fell apart. 

“The Nazis from the news? What the hell do they have to do with us?”

“Those assholes must have recognized me.”

“Recognized you as what? What are you telling me? You’re mixed up with Nazis?”

“You heard about the Winter Solder? Part of the whole Hydra expose.” That part of the story hadn’t gotten a ton of press, and the list of victims had definitely been hushed up as quickly as possible and erased. Bucky had a feeling they’d largely hushed it up as part of the government’s attempt at damage control, but he _had_ been mentioned.

“He’s an assassin, right? What was his name… something dumb. He was Captain America’s friend. Oh.” Jonathan’s eye traveled to the iPod that was still playing in the other room, still showing clips of Steve doing stupid stuff. Realization dawned. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said, “that guy.”

“That’s you?”

“That’s me.” Bucky cringed as he said it, but almost immediately felt better. It helped, too, to have the information accompanied by something good, and something funny.

“So, Barnes isn’t your real name?”

“It’s my real name. Last name. My friends used to call me Bucky.” It felt good to say it, to name Jonathan as a friend, to be the kind of guy again who _had_ friends. He’d needed to say it out loud, to see Jonathan’s blank but thankfully not frightened face, and know that the previous weeks hadn’t been wiped out by this revelation.

“Okay, Bucky. Right, I knew that. I knew it was something dumb,” Jonathan asked, and just like that, everything was okay.

They both looked at the bodies. Actually, there was only one body. The second one still twitched, and seemed to be listening and wanting to threaten, even as blood spilled from his lips. It wouldn’t be long till he was gone. Bucky felt sick looking at him. Yet another about-to-be-corpse, yet more unwanted violence. 

Bucky felt trapped. He needed to go somewhere where this would never happen again, where he’d hopefully never again be called upon to make it quick.

“Nice shot,” he conceded, congratulating Jonathan for having done most of the work for him. A first, in a long long while.

“I used to go to the gun range sometimes.”

“It shows,” Bucky said automatically, already sick with himself for knowing how to calculate the angle at which he’d have to twist his boot on the guy’s neck to end it. Already thinking of good spots to bury these assholes where no one would ever trace it back to either of them. 

“What now?” Jonathan asked.

Still computing, Bucky glanced at the television, at the still-running travelogue. 

“You wanna go to Nepal? Fine. Let’s go to fucking Nepal. Tomorrow. Let’s get as far away from here as possible. Now.”

“What about…?”

“I’ll take care of it. It won’t ever come back to here, to you, to us. I’ll make it go away. You book the tickets. I’ll take care of these bodies.” 

The not-quite-body gave another anguished twitch. Bucky went to the kitchen for a chef’s knife, sighing as he pulled it out of the drawer.

* * *

**Present Day**

Steve had barely dropped off when he heard something—a sound he would never be able to place, no matter how many times he heard it, because it wasn’t anything natural. And then Bucky’s voice, saying “Wake up, Steve.”

He didn’t feel the now-familiar pushing sensation that usually accompanied these dreams of Bucky. Neither did he feel that he was floating, nor the weightless splitting of self. And he didn’t feel himself—the self that split off—returning comfortably to his old, smaller self. This was all too real. He could feel the weight of his body, tall and heavy as in reality. 

But then he opened his eyes, and saw Bucky sitting on the edge of the bed, looming over him. 

“You’re not dreaming,” Bucky whispered. “Not this time. Not the other times either, but—”

“What?” Steve interrupted, because if those times hadn’t been dreams, then what had they been? 

“Another time.”

“Bucky, are you really here this time?” 

“Yeah, I am.”

“Have you been here the other times, too?”

“More or less, though not the way you think. It’s complicated. Look, Steve. I’ve come because I need some help. There’s something going on, and… I know it’s a lot to ask, but—”

“Whatever you need, Buck. I’ll get the whole team. I’ll—”

“No. I want you,” Bucky said quickly, and then gulped awkwardly. “I mean, only you. Not the whole peanut gallery. Please.”

“Okay,” Steve said, as they both knew he was going to. 

“How do you let ‘em know you’re going off the grid? In a way where they don’t send out a search party. Is there a way to do that?”

“I could text Natasha. We have a code for things like this. They won’t like it, but there’s a way to do it where they’ll believe me. I doesn’t matter, though. The second we walk out the front door, there'll be eyes on us."

"That's why we aren't using the front door."

Only now, after the initial shock and disbelief had passed, did Steve notice the lack of alarms, the quiet all around. 

“Are we going through the window?”

“No.”

"Buck. How have you been getting in?"

"Same way we're getting out. Steve, remember how you showed up in Azzano magically 110 pounds heavier and a foot taller? And I just went with it?"

"I remember you chewing me out about experimental procedures and risking my life unnecessarily and being an idiot and..."

"Like I said. I rolled with it.” He seemed nervous, antsy in a way he had been when he’d first shown up in Steve (apparently not quite) dreams. The shifty downcast eyes and tensed thigh of stress. “Do you trust me? You shouldn’t, not anymore, but—”

“I’ve always trusted you, with everything I’ve got. Nothing’s ever gonna change that.”

Bucky reached into his pocket and slid what looked like a pair of brass knuckles over the fingers of his flesh hand. Steve watched how they glinted in the moonlight and asked himself why a supersoldier with a metal arm needed brass knuckles. 

Bucky stretched his arms straight out and waved the brass knuckles in a slow, concentrated rhythm. Steve blinked when sparks not only appeared, but settled into a circle four feet across. The circle hovered, unmoving, a foot off the ground. Through it Steve could see soft light, and what looked like a room—a different room, homier than this one, one with lamps and soft-looking, worn furniture. He knew he was supposed to get up, but the sight kept him frozen, and a long-forgotten gnawing terror returned. Thor had taken the Tesseract back to Asgard, but the memory of it had stayed with Steve. He’d seen holes open up in nowhere before, with unlikely destinations on the other side. First with Red Skull and then with the aliens over Stark Tower. 

He didn’t have a great feeling about it. But he’d meant what he’d said. He’d trust Bucky to the ends of the earth, and intended to prove it.

There was nothing for it but to follow him through, because he’d be damned if he let Bucky out of his sight, now that he’d gotten him back in the flesh. 

Steve had expected to feel something, but this was as easy as bending to walk through a short door. 

He saw a man sitting in a wheelchair that had been set up near the kitchen table. His fists must have been clenched even before Steve and Bucky had stepped through. They looked as though they’d been clenched in anger for days. 

“You’re smaller in real life,” the man said. “What is it? Are the rest of the Avengers are short, making you look tall?”

Steve was caught off-guard, and chuckled despite himself. “Pretty much. Actually, they’re all shorter than you probably think. Except Thor. Thor’s as big as he seems.”

“Steve,” Bucky said, looking between them with fondness stamped on his brow, “this is my friend Jonathan.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Steve.”

“I’d get up and shake your hand, but someone paralyzed me. Fucking _again_.”

Steve glanced at Bucky for some help. Bucky’s fists had also clenched, in sympathy or his own anger, Steve couldn’t tell. Steve felt a pang of jealousy. Bucky had a different friend, one who made him this angry on his behalf. And then he told himself to get over it, because _he_ was the one Bucky had gone to for help. _He_ was the one he’d been weirdly visiting all these nights, and had kissed so sweetly that last time.

So, all he said was, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“That’s the mission, actually,” Bucky explained to Steve. “Someone stole his magic. We’ve got to get it back so he can walk again. We’ve got to stop the guy who took it before he takes mine, too, and things get even worse.”

“Your guys’s _what_?” Steve asked.


End file.
